In processing systems, including both data processing and communications systems, it is desirable to provide user interfaces which are convenient, efficient, accurate and cost effective. With the introduction of pen-based laptop computing, and its growing popularity, computer recognition of handwriting, both cursive and printed, is of increasing importance. Until recently, processing system recognition of handwritten data received relatively little attention in comparison to optical character recognition, speech recognition, and other image or scene analysis.
In the late 1960's there was a fair amount of interest in cursive script and print recognition, but this activity waned in the 1970's and early 1980's. Interest increased significantly from the mid-1980's through the present with the introduction of small, but sufficiently powerful, portable computers. Development of pen-based computing quickly followed, resulting in several commercial products which experienced limited success. The limited success was due largely to a lack of speed and accuracy in recognizing and authenticating cursive and print handwriting, precluding these products from being sufficiently useful for many applications. Many early handwriting recognition systems produced dismally poor results, some studies reporting as low as 30% recognition accuracy of handwritten letter data. Worse, research efforts, which often utilized select training data, produced only marginal improvements over the aforementioned results. Recognition accuracy remains the dominant obstacle to producing commercially successful products.